Oregon's call center gains mean losses elsewhere

When corporations award jobs to one community, invariably another community loses out.

Such is the case with a couple of recent news items about Consumer Cellular and Comcast call centers.

When Portland-based Consumer Cellular said Wednesday it will open a new call center in Redmond effective Aug. 1, it was great news for the job-starved Central Oregon city. The provider of no-contract cell phone service subleased the call center operated by T-Mobile, which in March said it was shuttering the facility. Consumer Cellular said it would hire some 650 people for the Redmond center, many of them former T-Mobile employees.

The announcement wasn’t so great for Phoenix. Consumer Cellular had planned to open a second call center there, one that would employ 300-350 people. The company already operates one call center there, which employs 320.

Consumer Cellular CEO John Marick said the company had chosen a preferred location in northwest Phoenix and was negotiating with the landlord there when T-Mobile made its closure announcement.

It was “not quite the last hour, but close to it,” he said.

The sublease in Redmond saved the company money on rent and offered room to grow, he said. It also was a good opportunity to save some jobs in the area and hire experienced call-center employees.

Meanwhile, Comcast Corp.’s (NASDAQ: CMC) announcement Wednesday that it will add 100 jobs at its Beaverton call center had some fallout in St. Paul, Minn. According to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, Comcast said it will lay off 68 people at its regional headquarters there.

Positions in St. Paul involving the handling of some inbound sales calls are coming to Beaverton.

Not to feel too sorry for Minnesotans, however. Comcast plans to hire about 200 call center employees by the end of the year to work at its offices in St. Paul and Minnetonka.